Another thread that was lost. About how some Republicans are abandoning their party or distancing themselves. We also lost Jeff Flake's extraordinary speech. The article below is more sanguine, though. A moment of triumph for the GOP. However, amid setbacks, and a bleak-looking future.

WASHINGTON — Paul Ryan, as 2017 wound down, looked like a man who had dodged a meteor strike.

The Republican House speaker from Wisconsin, in fact, looked like a man who had been relieved of a great weight at his weekly press conference in the final days of his party’s push to pass a massive tax cut through Congress.

He probably couldn’t imagine how it would feel to maneuver a big piece of legislation to the finish line. Most days were consumed with the tweet-inspired chaos that has become the norm in Donald Trump’s Washington.

And yet there Ryan was, on the verge of a tax bill and talking about entitlement reform in 2018.

Changes to Medicare and Social Security might be a political fantasy, but the fact that Ryan was even discussing it had to feel good for the 47-year-old speaker. Substantive tax and entitlement reform have been his top goals since he arrived in Congress in 1999.

And while only the corporate tax cuts are permanent, it’s better than the worst-case scenario that many Republicans like Ryan have feared about the Trump presidency.

The republic still stands. Republicans, however, are tottering.

Election results in Virginia and Alabama suggest that a massive wave is building in favor of the Democrats that could eliminate the GOP’s 24-seat majority and give Democrats control of the lower chamber of Congress.

And even though a Ryan confidante bristled at rumors that the speaker would retire after 2018, a Democratic majority would very likely give Ryan all the reason he needed to check out of a job he never wanted in the first place.

Republicans will end the year on a high note, after passing the tax-cut legislation. But their jubilation springs largely from relief that they have put a Band-Aid on what was otherwise a dismal first year for Trump and their party. To have ended the year with no legislative accomplishments, despite control of both the House and Senate, would have been an unthinkable embarrassment.

The Republican Party "has lost its way"
Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Arizona, joins Face the Nation Moderator John Dickerson to discuss his new book, "Conscience of a Conservative" that calls on Republicans to return to their conservative principles.

The #NeverTrump Movement Has Been Neutered
Conservative opposition to Trump is splintered and more than a bit pessimistic about what comes next.
BY Asawin Suebsaeng and Sam Stein

“We are going to have another primary election at some point and someone is going to run against him, that’s a lock. And the question then is going to be: Are all those people going to fight over who the best person to oppose him is, or are they going to support the person who could best beat him in a primary?” said Rory Cooper, a former staffer to onetime House Majority Leader Eric Cantor. “If there was a movement, there would be some definition of what the goals are rather than just screaming from the highest rooftop about how terrible Trump is.”

But, as Cooper added, “There is no movement.”

#NeverTrump was born during the 2016 campaign out of a sense of anguish and fright. The notion that a reality-TV star who, not so far back in his life, was a cosmopolitan elite, politically minded New York City liberal would manage to win the Republican presidential primary first seemed far fetched and then frighteningly real. At some point in between, a contingent of operatives, conservative-media personalities, and a smattering of lawmakers claimed that they would resist Trump’s rise, either by denying him the nomination or facilitating his defeat.

The "Never Trumpers" are still there (in National Review anyway) but my hunch is they are holding back.

The tax bill just got passed, and no one knows what that will do for the economy or the public's perception of the country.

We have the governor of New York State saying he's going to sue over the tax law, but that, while being amusing, won't work.

Will Trump pull off completing Bill Clinton's border wall with Mexico? If he does, and the economy continues to soar, don't look for a "movement".
_________________Proud Republican Elephant Flying on Magic Carpet

Really? What about the "rebels" among the Reps (McCain, Corker, Flake, etc.)? And this:

The conservative resistance: the rightwingers who stood up to Trump
Trump’s first year in office has not produced the triumphs he might have hoped for, thanks in part to a small band of conservatives who made life difficult for him.

For a man who describes himself as a master deal-maker, Trump’s first year in office has seen remarkably few deals.

Much of this is down to the Republican party’s distrust of Trump. But while some members of Congress, of the Senate, and of the conservative commentariat have chuntered behind closed doors before eventually falling in line with the president, others have stood up to Trump and actively resisted his goals.

These people aren’t exactly liberal heroes, and they have their own reasons and agendas for their resistance. But in one way or another, some conservatives have stood up to the Trump government. Here we highlight a few of them.

Jeff Flake
The Arizona senator released a book in August that criticized Trump and the Republican party as a whole. Flake said he was concerned about the “nationalism,” “populism,” and “xenophobia” he saw in the GOP, and compared Nixon’s “madman theory” – a strategy the 37th president used to convince his enemies that he was dangerous, to Trump’s behavior.

“Absent strategy, we are left with no theory, just the madman,” Flake wrote.

Flake opposed Trump during the election and in the early months of his presidency, but since October, when Flake announced he was not seeking reelection, he has emerged as an even more powerful anti-Trump voice.

“I will not be complicit,” Flake said in a Senate speech announcing his decision. “We must never meekly accept the daily sundering of our country – the personal attacks, the threats against principles, freedoms, and institutions; the flagrant disregard for truth or decency, the reckless provocations.”

When Trump retweeted a series of anti-Muslim videos originally posted by a far-right British politicians, Flake was one of the few to call out the president’s behavior as “inappropriate”.

And in the Alabama special election earlier this month, Flake backed Doug Jones – writing a $100 check to the Democrat’s campaign. After Jones’s victory was confirmed Flake posted a two word tweet: “Decency wins.”

Shepard Smith
The long-time Fox News journalist has punctured Trump’s balloon time and again during his midday show Shepard Smith Reporting. In December Smith said it was “a lie” that the Russia collusion investigation was, as Trump has called it “fake news”.

In November Smith debunked a conspiracy theory – promoted by Trump – that Hillary Clinton had approved the sale of uranium to Russia in exchange for donations to the Clinton Foundation.

And in July, Smith, referring to the Trump administration’s statements on the infamous meeting with a Russian lawyer at Trump Tower, asked on his show: “Why is it lie after lie after lie?” (He also described “the deception” by the government as “mind-boggling”.)

Smith’s show serves as a rare dose of truth telling on a Fox News channel that has firmly thrown its weight behind Trump. It hasn’t gone down well with some viewers however – many of whom have used social media to call for Smith to be fired.

Susan Collins
Collins is the Republican senator who has most frequently voted against the president’s wishes. According to FiveThirtyEight the Maine senator has voted in line with Trump 81.5% of the time – while the majority of her GOP colleagues have stuck with the president’s position in over 90% of their votes.

Most importantly, Collins was one of the senators who doomed Republican attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act in the Senate, repeatedly voting against her own party and outspoken in her criticism of her colleagues. Announcing her opposition to a GOP healthcare bill in September, Collins described the legislation – which the CBO said would strip health insurance from millions of Americans – as “deeply flawed”. The Maine senator added that the bill would have a “substantially negative impact on the number of people covered by insurance”. It was a surprising – and brave – stance against something which had essentially been the GOP’s platform for the previous eight years.

On the president himself, Collins said during the election campaign that she would not vote for Trump, and more recently has been critical of Trump’s use of Twitter – even if that criticism was rather tepid. “The president needs to remember that his every word he speaks matters now that he is president of the United States,” she said in October.

Like many on this list, Collins’ opposition to Trump has not been consistent. In December she voted for the Republican tax bill – which would grant disproportionately benefit the wealthiest.

Bill Kristol
The conservative commentator, Republican operative and founder of the conservative Weekly Standard supported Sarah Palin for John McCain’s running mate in the 2008 presidential election. But Donald Trump was a step too far for Kristol, who was a vocal critic of the New York businessman during the presidential election campaign and has not let up since the president took office.

In June, after Trump tweeted a video of him beating up a human figure with a CNN logo for a head, Kristol said the US was “recapitulating the decline and fall of Rome”. He has regularly used his column in the Weekly Standard to denounce Trump – he called him a “talented demagogue” in a September post, and as recently as November Kristol claimed that Trump was “bringing out my inner liberal” in a post on Twitter.

Quote:

@BillKristol
The GOP tax bill's bringing out my inner socialist. The sex scandals are bringing out my inner feminist. Donald Trump and Roy Moore are bringing out my inner liberal.
WHAT IS HAPPENING?

Earlier in the year Kristol was also said to be in discussions about creating a “Committee not to renominate the president” in 2020. We’ll have to wait to see if that happens.

John McCain
The Arizona senator has always been known as an independent voice in the Republican party. But his readiness to go against the president has taken observers by surprise.

After Collins, McCain is the GOP senator who has most often voted against Trump, and like Collins, he voted against the Republicans’ attempt to repeal Obamacare in September.

McCain voted against a different version of the GOP healthcare bill in July. Less than two weeks after undergoing surgery for recently diagnosed brain cancer, McCain returned to DC to cast his “no” vote in a moment of high political drama.

The Arizona senator has at times seemed emboldened since his July return to the Senate, and has repeatedly criticized Trump – most forcefully in a September op-ed in the Washington Post. In the current climate, McCain wrote, “Congress must govern with a president who has no experience of public office, is poorly informed and can be impulsive in his speech and conduct.” It was as succinct a takedown as any a Democrat could manage.